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I’ve heard the oft repeated meme that Islam is a religion of peace, and that the terror unleashed upon the world is not representative of the vast majority of Muslims. I’m willing to believe that for the simple reason that were we to have a majority of the over 1 billion people who identify as Muslim committing acts of terror, the things we deal with now would be minor. If most Muslims were committed to violent jihad there would be no place to hide. We would be engaged in global guerrilla warfare all day every day. I must infer from the fact that this isn’t happening that most Muslims are not willing to kill people for the advancement of their religious ideals. But that is not the same thing as believing most Muslims are committed to peaceful coexistence with anyone who is not Muslim or those who oppose Islamic ideology. The question is one of utmost importance to the future of the world.

I know the secular West has done its best to take the teeth out of religion. God is dead is a pretty explicit cannon shot in the face of religious ideologies. But there is also the blurring of any remaining religious systems of thought into a homogenous blob that attempts to domesticate them. Nietzsche was killing religious thought with nuclear weapons; the radioactive religious leftovers at ground zero decided to tame it. All roads lead to God. All religions are basically the same and noble in their effort to bring about unity of mankind; love and peace. But religious ideologies have proven to be remarkably resistant to nukes and to assimilation. Islam is impervious to Nietzsche and to secularization because it sees itself as it really is; a competing worldview with as much right to its claims of truth as anyone else’s. Nietzsche proclaimed that all claims about the nature of truth were power plays designed to elevate the group making the claim. What he seems not to notice is that while he was fiddling with his own brand of jihadist nuclear weapon, he set it off in his own face. For what greater power play could there be than to claim God is dead? What great truth claim could anyone make than Nietzsche did? And so he taught us we should disregard his own claim as a mere attempt to gain power over us. There is a big bang for you. And the secularists did no better when lumping all religions into one thing that has no real edges. The problem with their claim that all religions are the same is the same as Nietzsche; it is a statement about the nature of reality that by its very nature elevates itself above all the other claims. In other words the secularist attempt to lump all religions together is itself a religion; a set of beliefs that has no foundation better than any of the religions it attempts to dethrone. Muslims and other people of faith can see the hypocrisy and the search for power in these claims. Their truth is able to compete on the field of ideologies along with every other ideology. If the nukes and the blurring lines didn’t touch them you can be sure that mocking them as a people stuck in the stone age won’t effect them either.

Now to the real question. Muslims are not going to give up their ideology; is their ideology compatible with peace? We know that in the history of the world there have been ideologies that were not peaceful and could not coexist within the civilized world. They had to be defeated. The case for Islam is very complex. If Islam is going to continue as an ideology it can only go one of two ways. Either Islam conquers the world or Islam conquers itself. The first scenario is obvious. It means that persistent insistent conversion of all people through any means necessary is an Islamic principle, core to the ideology. There is no negotiating with this Islam. The second scenario is that Islam rejects any coercive form of conversion and instead decides to depend upon the attractiveness of its core beliefs to bring people into its way of life; to make more Muslims. This may be possible. At this moment there are obviously more non-violent Muslims than violent Muslims. But where is the rejection of the violent means of advancing Islam? If I am to believe most Muslims are non-violent because there are not more terrorist attacks in the world, I must also believe that a majority of over 1 billion people raising an outcry against the portion of their religion’s people who are violent would be very loud and clear. Very loud and clear. If extremist Christians were regularly blowing up abortion clinics all over the world in some wrong headed and perverted version of Christian belief, would Christendom police itself? Would Christians attempt to uncover their plots and bring these terrorists to justice? Or would they sit back and allow these bad apples to advance their agenda without implicitly supporting them. Would they say to themselves that abortion is a very bad ungodly thing and, while they would never blow up a clinic personally, is it really so bad that one less abortion clinic is in the world and one less baby butcher is alive?

It is going to take active rejection of evil for Islam to prove that it is peaceful. Just as I would expect Christian churches to separate themselves from anyone doing evil in the name of Christianity, I believe mosques must do the same. There must be a movement to seek out and stop Islamic terrorists by people who follow Islam. It must be worldwide and it must be soon. I’m afraid the silence of the mass is already too deafening and ominous and may mean that either Muslims are not sure about what their religion demands of them or know that it demands extreme and violent activity that they themselves are not willing to carry out, but they are glad to have someone else do in the name of their god. The non-Muslim world should not accommodate Islamic coercion. No threat ever led to a valid conversion to any ideology. We should encourage Muslims who see this and accept this point to speak up loud and clear. This generation will not pass away before we find out what Islam really is.

I am a pretty skeptical person. How about you? Tend to believe everything you hear or tend to be doubtful until there’s proof? Skepticism (brother-in-law to Cynicism) is a trait many of us take for granted as “right” and “sensible.” But have you ever taken a moment to doubt your doubts? If we are going to be consistent skeptics, shouldn’t we be skeptical about our own skepticism? Why is it better to doubt everything and how do I know which doubts are healthy and which are unhealthy? Skepticism actually turns out to be a faith system – ie I only believe what I see or what is proved, or at a deeper level of skepticism, I don’t believe that anything can be known at all. Do you see the faith commitment it takes to be a skeptic? You must believe nothing outside of what is proved to you is valid…and that itself can’t be proven, it can only be taken on faith. The human heart has no way to function outside faith commitments. Even our doubts are radical leaps of faith.

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Man set to sue first responders who rescued him from his submerged car – that is a real headline from today’s news. Not a joke or a parody of this scene from The Incredibles:

Watching the interview of the man with his lawyer made me want to punch somebody in the neck – mainly the lawyer. Some of his facial expressions are so… so… so… smug and condescending. Now, now, don’t blame me for taking full advantage of any opportunity I find to exploit the system – that’s what his face screams. Neck punch. We are living at an amazing time. We live in a land of laws with no connection to their source. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that when laws and rights are elevated to the status of absolutes, we should find ourselves barraged by legal actions that defy belief. A NJ teenager suing her parents for the cost of college tuition after she left home or was thrown out – an executive branch of government that selectively enforces laws or rewrites laws completely outside of its legal authority – these things are to be expected. Law doesn’t work if it is not a given thing. That sounds strange, but it is true. If grace = a gift, then law cannot work without grace. It also sounds strange but the reason we are becoming more and more lawless is that law has become more important, not less important to us. These yahoos running around suing people who saved their lives value law over grace. They fail to see anything as a gift. Everything has a price tag and the people who are going to thrive and survive are going to be the ones who figure out how to charge a price for anything they can. If law is disconnected from grace – in other words if law is not given to us from some place or some where or some one other than us, then it is completely negotiable every day, every way, every circumstance. You could say that this guy who got rescued is ungrateful. Right. Exactly. He is an ingrate. He apparently believes it was his right to be rescued and rescued on time. No such thing as gratitude. No such thing as grace.

Since we are raising kids to believe there is no God and increasingly our politicians act as if God is the most unwelcome entity in our legal, social, or political processes, then the law is what we have and it is nothing. The law is useless. If we make it up for ourselves, the law is a power play. Whoever has the most power now gets to make or break the laws at will. Why shouldn’t they? Law is constructed by people if God didn’t make it and if that is the case why should the last set of people to make up laws keep telling us what to do? Dump it. Rewrite it. Ignore it. Sue your rescuers. The Bible says the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The opposite is true too: the ignorance of God is the beginning of stupidity. We are in a slide down into idiocy. But as hard as it is to take, we don’t have to take it and we don’t have to go nuts looking for solutions that are so hard to reach or enact. Just believe. Start believing. Look at the evidence this world presents for a moral framework we all believe in although we struggle to know why. Big turns come in little increments. If this story ticks you off, maybe it could be the thing that gets you thinking about what kind of world you’re living in and what you can do to change it.

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“The war (WWII) will fail to absorb our whole attention because it is a finite object and, therefore, intrinsically unfitted to support the whole attention of a human soul.”
– C. S. Lewis

Late one night I was contemplating the safety of my wife and kids. I was on a ship somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. If you are a thinker, underway on a ship at night can be a lonely place. I worried about who would check the front door and make sure it was locked. What if they had a flat tire, who would help them? What if the baby got sick? What if someone broke into the house? What if my wife gets in a wreck? On and on it went. My own bad news network broadcasting in my head. My favorite channels to tune into: doubt, fear, and worry. There seemed to be no end to the channel surfing. But I got a break through signal from God. He walked me through some simple thoughts: what if you weren’t 4000 miles from home right now, you’re on the ship sitting at the pier in homeport…I was liking this channel…now imagine you have to spend the night on the ship because you have duty…ok I may not like this channel so much…but you’re there and your family is at your house about 20 miles away, who is keeping your family safe from the things you’re worrying about? I had to say all of my fears could come true even if the ship was in homeport. Then He asked me if all of them could come true if I was in the house or car with my family. All of them could. God revealed to me His constant watchfulness and care was what kept my family safe (and always had been). What a blow to my ego! It’s not me who’s been ensuring our well being it is God. In that moment I didn’t relinquish control of my family, I acknowledged I never had control of my family. What a relief!

Who is keeping you safe? If I was depending upon our government to keep us safe I would still be up in the middle of the night, not because it is incompetent, but because the absolute safety of a soul is beyond the reach of any government. If any government of ours ever sets out to make us each “safe” we should all head for the hills as fast as we can go. The only way humans know to keep other humans safe is to take away their freedom. It is only in a sovereign creator God that we find both freedom and safety. As C.S. Lewis said of World War II, war will fail to absorb our whole attention because it is finite. We should add fear, worry, doubt…everything else will fail to hold our attention because we have infinite souls. We have God sized souls. Rest, peace and hope only come from having God in our souls, and once you’ve recognized and invited infinity into your soul, the finite will have to flee. When all the bad news starts again, instead of letting it force you to ask “where is God?” let it remind you that you are not in control, and you need God. The distance between you and safety is the exact distance between you and God. How far apart are you? At Calvary God erased the distance between Himself and us through Christ. Now, through faith in Him, we can say there is no distance between our souls and God. That is safety. No wonder Jesus said “Let not your heart be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me.”

My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, put your hope in the Lord both now and forevermore. Ps 131

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One of the most sacred ideas of authentic Christ followers (if not the most sacred) is the freedom of will and thought. A true follower of Jesus doesn’t just tell you to feel free to have an opinion and to express it, they actually believe you are free to have an opinion and to express it. Without this freedom there are no lovers of God, there is no repentance, there is no choice. Anyone who attempts to steal your freedom in the name of Christ is a thief and has climbed into the sheep pen rather than using the gate Jesus created by shedding His blood.

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Olevskoy shouted, “No! Absolutely not! I will not risk an ambush!”
“I swear to you,” Greenwood shouted, “that there will be no ambush, and that you will have the freedom of the village afterward.” Distant echoes, then calm again.
Olevskoy shouted, “Do you believe in God?”
Greenwood was flabbergasted. After a moment he shouted, “No!”
“Then who are you to swear to anything?”
(from The Blue-eyed Shan by Stephen Becker)

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“Happy New Year.” (no, no exclamation mark, just period) Smile. Words. Move on. I do it every year and it is done to me every year. Mechanical, and polite and seasonally appropriate. But it seems like many people did not have a happy 2013; at least from the comments I’ve heard and seen. And this year I get a sense that there is not a great deal of confidence about 2014 being a better year. We can have a happy new year. You can have a happy new year. The worst can come to pass and not make it a bad year. What is the worst for you? Financial ruin? Relational failure? Health destroyed? If you have health and wealth and great relationships, there is a way to have them better than you’ve ever had them before. Healthier. Wealthier. Lovelier.

There is a secret to having a happy new year. It is an open secret, however and we are all able to learn it. If 2013 wasn’t a good year for you, it is probably because you feel you were impoverished in some way. You lost something. Your money did fly away. Or you did lose a relationship or your health did fail. If 2013 was a good year it was probably good because you feel you were enriched in one or more of those areas: bank account, love life, health (although we don’t always take note of this at the time). If you are nervous or hopeful about 2014 it has to do with the prospects of being enriched or impoverished in those areas next year. But what if you were so rich in all those areas you could not become enriched or impoverished? What if you had so much wealth, and health, and love that giving as much as you could give you never got poorer or sicker, or lonelier? Brewster’s Millions was a movie in the mid 80’s with RIchard Pryor and John Candy (enough reason to want to see it). Brewster inherits a ton of money, 30 million, but the catch is that he can inherit 300 million if he spends the 30 million in 30 days without telling anyone what he is doing. He goes on a mad spending spree trying to lose all his money and have nothing to show for it. The only problem is the more he spends the more money he makes.

That sounds like a great concept, you say, but I don’t have a rich uncle to leave me 300 million, and there is no fountain of youth to sustain my health or a way to keep from losing my loved ones. I can be impoverished and I can be enriched, and I have to take care of myself. Not if you learn the secret. The Apostle Paul wrote about the secret in a letter to his friends at Phillipi. He said:

“I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”

When he wrote those words he was in prison facing execution. He was in the most impoverished state imaginable; away from relationships, wealth and health. Yet he says he is content. To be precise he says he had “learned” to be content. He said he had been wealthy and poor and come to a place where neither state changed his true condition. He was full. He was Brewster. He found out that no matter what he spent he wasn’t poorer. He found out that no matter what he gained he wasn’t any richer. What happened to Paul? Could it happen to us? In reality he found out that he didn’t have a rich uncle who died and left him everything, but he did have a rich older brother who died and made him into the heir of infinite riches. Riches that can not be exhausted. This is the Christian story of the world. Jesus Christ, the true older brother, the one in line to receive the inheritance of God the Father, chose to die on a cross so that we could become the heirs. But it isn’t only wealth that comes to us through him (although God is the owner of all things and so we can lay claim to all wealth), but it is also health given in the defeat of death and love given in the defeat of hell. The cross is Jesus the infinitely wealthy, healthy, and beloved becoming utterly impoverished so that anyone who asks according to his name can become heirs of God. He loses all his possessions, even the clothes off his back are taken away at the cross. He loses his health, writhing up and down as he is executed. And worst of all he loses his Father, crying out in abandonment. All is lost so that infinite love, health and wealth can pass to us. This is the secret Paul learned. This is the way to have a happy new year and forget the old. Become the heir. Take the offer. And then go on a spending spree. Give away as much love and money and energy as you can. You can’t lose.